The main problem they’re addressing is the atomization of information and how it gets delivered on the Web. You know how it goes: We get pinged every second by micro-updates, snippets and interruptions, all often arriving without context or background. The result? Everything becomes noise. Ads, it turns out, annoy us to the point of anger.

Here’s the report’s big-picture fix to this problem: To cut through the clutter of the Internet, we need to abandon one-way missives, and embrace two-way conversations that inspire loyalty and trust.

Sounds good, but sounds hard, too. I’m not even sure how you define what a conversation is. Being deeply authentic in any one-on-many conversation is nearly impossible, no matter how open you are to comments and submissions. And how much time can a company realistically invest in responding to every individual’s question and comment (there is of course a limit, unless you push the work, I mean conversation, onto a network)? But maybe that’s not the goal. And I have a suspicion that most consumers will provide sarcastic floggings of any brand trying to use authenticity and friendly chats in the service of making sales. Because that is the result that companies pay marketers for, right?

In the process of this research, the mad scientists discovered a strong consumer demand for, as mentioned above, two-way conversations that are transparent and honest. People “seek a new relationship that is built on trust, not simply on the value of the content or advertising itself.” (pages 4-5).

This idea is described as not just a communication technique, but a new communication environment – a new context for chit chatting about your favorite vacuum cleaner. That environment gets a name: Communitas, with which there “is no such thing as one-way communication.” The transition to this environment is perhaps the answer to a Web world that has left me a bit rattled.

A lot of this is confirming what many media freaks already suspected, so my questions after reading the report are along the lines of, “OK, but how do you actually do this in terms of cost, time, authenticity and efficacy?” The report does go into the AP’s specific efforts to do so around news on page 59 (AP’s engagement model), but I’ll let you dig into that.

Here are the general recommendations:

1. Match Your Organization’s Principles to the Attributes of Communitas
   > How do your strategies, products, ser- vices and people fare in terms of collaboration, adhering to the social contract, developing kinship, reciprocity and relevance?
2. Create Environments for Communitas to Break Out
   > The solution is not just to create more engaging content. The solution is to create better environments for engaging with content.
3. Embrace the Challenge, No Matter the Size of Your Organization
   > Information companies and advertisers of all sizes should benefit from strengthening their relationship with the audience.
4. Parting Thought: Give Real Communication a Chance
   > Whether you are a student of anthropology or not, the message from this research is that a new path is opening for both

And the ad folks were inspired to come up with the campaign Stop the Adness. Its principles:

1. Collaboration – We must work with the marketplace — coming together with mutual respect for each other’s roles — to determine what more effective communication looks like.
2. Social Contract – The unwritten code that defines our behavior has been broken by advertisers, agencies and the media. We must show consumers that with their help we can rebuild it.
3. Kinship – We must recognize mutual respon- sibility and accountability within the marketplace as a means toward building better communication.
4. Honesty – Marketing spin and hype will no longer be tolerated in the new communications landscape, so we must be honest and transparent.
5. Reciprocity – Good communication requires give and take; so we must listen and respond accordingly.
6. Relevance – The market will listen when our message is relevant and targeted; so we must do more to better craft our messages.
7. Information – We must provide solid facts on which to base our communication and advertising.
8. Investigation – We must provide a clear roadmap for people who want to dig deeper.
9. Overload – We must be careful how much and how often we communicate so as not to overload consumers.
10. Sharing – When our information and ad- vertising is shared we will know we are doing our job right.

Varian believes that a new era is dawning for what you might call the datarati—and it’s all about harnessing supply and demand. ‘What’s ubiquitous and cheap?’ Varian asks. ‘Data.’ And what is scarce? The analytic ability to utilize that data.”

Providing information analysis is a task that is related to but much different than providing information gathering and presentation. It requires a precise understanding of a customer’s problem in order to be useful. Sounds like another business on top of the news business. Aren’t high-end consultants already doing this? Should/do media companies compete in this space?

Inspiration: A CNN story about Riversimple, a company from the U.K. that has come up with a hydrogen-powered, less-poluting city car. Sebastien Piëch, a partner in the company, said this:

We don’t believe that making money on IP (intellectual property) is really what’s actually happening even now. We believe that service and providing the solution for customers will be where we make money.”

Does this mean news organizations need to understand customers’ problems that are created when they interact with stories? And provide solutions to those problems?

I’ve written previously about possible journalistic services.

Source: A Harvard Business Review article from the May 2009 issue (p. 68 is relevant to this post) examining six mistakes companies make in managing capital. There’s a pay wall since the article is an issue old.

Relevance to media: What makes good or bad journalism? It’s a question Jeff Jarvis asks. Some news sites say it’s all about quickly getting up any tidbit of info and editing it live with help from the crowd. More traditional outlets attempt to create unassailable tanks of stories that rumble into the information battlefield and sit there, deflecting doubts until victory or submission to a stronger fact.

But once you define good or bad, how do you make your customer aware of it, and convince him or her that it matters?

Bottom line:

• Quality is a measure relative to your customer
• But a general news customer has a huge range of constantly shifting expectations when it comes to experiencing a story
• So one customer could want news fast, then later want it slow and rich, then happy, then sad, and so on
• That’s a lot of different versions of a “good story”
• So divvy up information by experience type instead of subject?
• Just know what your customers want, and when and how they want it
• Understand their experience with your product; what exactly are they reading that article for?
• Deliver that, no more, no less

It seems the Web, through the power of extensive, cheap and quick information distribution, is pushing all businesses to kill off historical inefficiencies and offer highly specific experiences and solutions at times and in forms dictated by consumers.

Or if I had an article in my pocket about a subject of my choosing, written in a way that I prefer, and I hinted at the content with nothing more than a limited summary, how much would you pay me for it and how much time would you take to consider the purchase?

How do you sell a story?

Maybe you don’t. Maybe you sell the experience the story generates?

What does the news do for people that they cannot do without?

Here’s one: Stories help make meaning.

They turn data into revelation.

How do you market that?

1. Forming groups of like interest / coordinate connections
2. Being in the know / personal topic guidance
3. Creating self-identity / ascribe values to information choices
4. Forming opinions / critiquing service
5. Sharing information (conversation, e-mail, clippings, recordings, etc.) to create social bonds / facilitate simplification and effectiveness of networking
6. Commenting upon information and expressing oneself /package user-generated content into media product that can be published, shared, found, marketed, jointly monetized

II. Research and information creation: Finding and making answers.

1. Make new information / writing and editing services
2. Answer questions / how to create good questions
3. Learn ways to allot limited resources (time, money, attention, energy) / lifestyle analysis and achieving information goal service

III. Entertainment: Please get me the hell out of my reality.

1. Distraction
2. Avoid work
3. Relax
4. Satisfy curiosity
5. Explore reality
6. ///// One service for all of these activities: Information health; know when you need to alter information activity to maintain health.

At every step, the information user needs to have the option of altering the type of experience they want with your information: click here and you can access deep information suited to a research task; click there and you can go into scanning (distraction) mode.

It’s a bit like having a pair of shoes that changes according to the weather; the pair of shoes is your story (from sandals for a hot day to galoshes for a downpour); the weather is the intent your customer brings to the information. The feet…are just hairy.

I can sense your RSS overload; you need to change your information activity ASAP. Here’s a free distraction service compliments of YouTube, m0serious and newsroomnext: